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Club History
The Bradford Football Club was formed in 1863, splitting with the other northern clubs to join the Northern Rugby Football Union in 1895 (subsequent rule changes would make rugby union and rugby league appreciably different games, but the initial split came about over a dispute over payments – the union clubs wanted to remain amateur, whilst the rugby league clubs wanted to turn professional). The club adopted the name Park Avenue (after their stadium) to distinguish themselves from Bradford City and the new Bradford Northern Rugby Football Club. In 1907, they decided to switch codes from rugby to football, and applied to join the Football League, but were rejected. As a stop gap, they joined the Southern League (strange times indeed – the Southern League was the only league outside of the Football League that professional clubs could play in at the time, so BPA had little choice), where they stayed for three years before finally joining the Football League the following year. One of the most distinctive things about Bradford Park Avenue was their Park Avenue stadium. Designed by the celebrated architect Archibald Leitch, it held 37,000 people in its prime, and was notable for a small pavilion in one corner called the “Doll’s House”, and a vast stand (as can be seen at the top of this article) with three gables built into the roof of it. It was, in its heyday, a considerably better stadium that Bradford City’s Valley Parade. There was some talk of a merger between the two clubs when Park Avenue joined the League, but nothing ever came of it, and City’s FA Cup win in 1911 (which turned out to be their only major trophy win) but the idea to bed for good. On the pitch, Park Avenue were initially very successful. They were promoted to Division One in 1913 and finished in ninth position in their first season there. Football, however, was disrupted by the outbreak of the First World War, and Park Avenue never recovered from the forced break, and were relegated twice in successive seasons, in 1921 and 1922. Promoted back to the Second Division in 1928, though, they would hold their place in English football’s second highest division for over two decades for being relegated back in 1950. In the immediate period after the Second World War, they earned themselves a reputation as a tricky team to draw in the FA Cup. In 1946, the made the FA Cup quarter-finals, in 1948 they beat Arsenal 1-0 at Highbury and in 1949 they held Manchester United to two draws before falling after a second replay. Their first brush with re-election came in 1956, and they were placed into the Fourth Division in 1958 when the Football League reorganised itself into four divisions. Their final promotion would come in 1961, but they were relegated again in 1963. Their decline after this is not easily explained. Throughout the rest of the 1960s, they became an almost permanent fixture near the bottom of the Division Four table, finishing in bottom place in 1968, 1969 and 1970. Their luck ran out in the summer of 1970, when they were voted out of the League and replaced by Cambridge United. The club limped on in the Northern Premier League, but massive debts forced them to sell Park Avenue and move in to share City’s Valley Parade in 1973, and they folded the following year. The clubs debts at the time of its death were recorded as £57,652 – £5,000 less that had caused the death of Accrington Stanley twelve years earlier. It was a tiny amount for the club to go bust over, but they had no assets following the sale of Park Avenue, and the death of their chairman and benefactor Herbert Metcalfe in 1971 had left them without their biggest source of income. Park Avenue stadium fell into disrepair – everything bar the terracing had been demolished by the early 1980s – but remained unused to the extent that the Park Avenue Sunday League team played a match there in 1987.